Thewood1

Not sure its related but the forum has been doing all kinds of weird stuff with passwords and resets. Every time I go away from the site, come back to login, I get an error that it doesn't recognize the new password. I have to reset my password every time I want to log in.

The other issue is one already discussed a lot. CM maps are smaller and tend to put the player's forces within shooting distance of the enemy main line with limited time to wait for scouts to step forward and just listen. I don't mean drive down the road and get shot at. I mean send two guys on foot forward as an OP just to listen for activity without being spotted. Might take 2-4 hours if you're lucky. Instead of giving the player time to to that, it might take the form of some more detailed pre-scenario intelligence that can get as specific as "we think there is an AT gun in that clump of trees next to the farm on that road." Doesn't have to be accurate. There can be false positives or MisIDs in the mix as well. I don't see a lot of designers take advantage of that.

And they will pay the price for your lack of concern for their well being.

Not particular to this scenario, but... Vehicles like the Puma and its brethren are not scouts. They are long range recon units built to feel out larger scale enemy locations and report to higher level HQ for more operational decision-making. In CM, they are typically not used at the right scale. Not to say they can't be useful as a base of fire for infantry units. But sending them down the road as scouts is a very quick way to end their little virtual lives. Where the Puma shines is on long range recon patrols supporting other more lightly armed ACs and HTs. The best scenarios for the Puma is as part of a larger recon force tasked with penetrating an enemy's recon screen or creating a screen against enemy recon units. Again, not saying they were never used in a pinch in a desperate straight up fight, but units like that are too valuable to throw away unless absolutely needed. Also, IIRC, the Puma and the 234 family had a special muffler system that dropped its engine noise to barely a whisper. Not sure if CM models that.

I am enraged.

Doesn't it also matter what mode you are playing...iron, elite, etc.? I thought C2 changed in more difficult settings.

This is related to troops missing radios, but check the ECM environment. That will reduce comms effectiveness, IIRC. Haven't played CM in a bit, but remember playing around with it.

Here is a part of the Graviteam game manual. I think this gives you a starting point as to what's possible.

Maybe take a look at how Graviteam games do it. The explicitly model cable and signal people in defensive setups. And they use colored smoke as a signaling method also, especially for offensive operations. The games have a pretty tight C2 representation, that might be a little too detailed, but they have various options you can turn off.

There's nothing shocking in it. They just look at deployments over the last 40 years and role tracked and wheeled vehicles played and why.

This is a pretty good Rand report that highlights tracked vs wheeled as a light/medium AFV/APC/IFV. I read it a last year when sandboxing some stuff in Steel Beasts around employment of Piranhas and LAVs. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1834.html

An amateur's view... The entire purpose of the Stryker was strategic mobility, not tactical mobility. The Stryker was developed to give infantry something more than a truck, which has limited tactical usefulness, and marching. And to also be able to be deployed by lighter air transport. Then once on the ground, be faster and more mobile than a truck or foot. The main strategic component, beyond mobility, was to be information. The ability to integrate tactical and some strategic information for use in removing FOW for tactical commanders was supposed to be the secret sauce. And in the game and in real life, people are trying to use Strykers like faster Bradleys. In game, its the fault of players and scenario designers. And of course, at design time, budgets were a factor as well. In Steel Beasts, there are a number of Stryker-like vehicles. There are even Stryker Dragoon-like vehicles, like DF-30s and BTR-82As. In current modern armies, there is a wave of wheeled APC/IFVs that have come through. SB shows that these vehicles do well in low-intensity combat and where you need to move long distances reliably and quickly. But as soon as you hit serious enemy forces, you need to drop infantry and move back to cover. Those wheeled APCs/IFVs get chewed up very quickly. They are limited in how they can be successfully deployed for combat. One thing SB also shows is that sending unsupported Stryker-like units across open fields is not good if limiting casualties is your goal. You better make sure you recon real well. Again, just an amateur's view from playing CM and SB.

Actually, it was the term enraged I keyed on. As my post about embellishment hinted at. And I have no issue with the conversation wasting time. I see you don't think so since you are still engaged.

And I think the thread helps make my main point that "certain" beta testers continue exaggerate the response of a very small number of people to make their points. Never thinking that someone might actually check it. MickeyD in particular. He has a lot of memories that seem to get embellished over the years.

So maybe I need to be specific...where is this mob of enraged CMBO fans in that thread. I can't believe we have to get down to defining words. So what is "some"?

Can someone point me to the rage part of that thread? Most of the responses seemed to be saying the opposite.

You have "distinctly" remembered a number of things wrongly over the years, so I'll not be taking your word for it.

I was one of the first purchasers of CMBB when it came out and followed the forums closely. I sure don't remember any "enraged" posts about language. There was some angst about the eastern front, but even that was pretty muted. I suspect a some beta testers overblow the response to certain things.

Why are these update threads always buried in one of the game threads? How about pinning it in the CM general thread and a headline at the top of the forums? It would be nice not to have to dig around.

I have been wondering if there is a law of diminishing returns on FPS in CM. I have watched carefully over the years as I change my laptop every year. I use Barkman's Corner as a benchmark. My last two PCs have all been over 4GHz CPU clock speed. But I am still getting 25-30 fps on maximum settings when looking up the road from behind the Panther. That's about what I was getting with a 3.3GHz PC four years ago. Granted that the nVidia cards improved along the way also.. I don't buy my PCs based on what I think CM's performance might be any more. It just seems the hardware doesn't matter after a certain point.

The only thing to be careful about with the M.2 formats is they generate a lot more heat than a SATA drive. If you have a laptop on the thermal edge, it can make the difference in thermal throttling.

That's true of almost any business that has any connection to the internet or social media. You can't be in business today in the US if you have thin skin. You do what's good for your business. If you are too concerned about what people think about you, your business's days are numbered.

Probably should have made that decision years ago. Its a good business decision.

Yeah, I don't think the TacAI has much context to incoming fire outside own morale state and direction of fire.

Steel Beasts does a few things to alleviate unit overload. 1) Individual units have some very good AI that takes care of positioning and retreat. I don't have to tell a unit to go to that exact spot and stay hull down. I give it a general area and an SOP. It figures out the speed to get there, whether to use a covered route, when to expose itself to fire at the enemy, etc. As an example, there is a thread on these boards about gun elevation on tanks and the difficulty in programming the AI. In SB, the unit AI knows when to move out from cover to shoot and when to back into cover, considering elevation along with a number of factors. 2) The commands you use to build an AI plan in the editor are available in the game for friendly forces. I can pretty easily script complex plans for units that branch based on what types of enemy or conditions exist. You can build in automatic fallback positions and resupply positions. You can tell a unit to drop infantry and when artillery starts falling, go pick them up. An almost innumerable number of things you can do just using an options dialog. 3) SOPs are critical to AI behavior. They combine dozens of commands and settings into 6-7 basic SOPs. FOr example, a scout SOP will have slow move, move through road, don't fire, retreat, move is incoming artillery, dismount troops, etc. all combined into one command to your recon units. Its fairly common in SB to command a small unit while the AI is fighting the bigger unit and your sister units around you. Its a pretty cool experience when done right. And again, I never play an individual unit. I play it as a wargame with the tools that SB provides out of the box. When compared to CM2, SB comes very close to being a command simulator. CM2 reminds me of a 3D board game with having to be the brains of every unit during execution.